Helping Young Shun 'Ideals' Of Violence

These past few weeks have been hard ones for the young people of
Manhattan's District 4. Our district is located just north of Central
Park, where the recent brutal attack on a young woman runner has
attracted national attention. Our school has been gripped by a special
sadness because one of the students in our building has been charged
with being a party in the attack.

Nothing I can tell you can explain what happened on that terrible
evening, but perhaps it can shed some light on the level of violence
prevalent in the world of adolescence.

I want to tell you about the problems our students face in their
daily lives.

I want to tell you about the impact of schooling on their attitude
toward and propensity for violence.

I want to tell you about an alternative approach to schooling that
could make a difference.

Most of the young people I see daily are low-income youngsters
living in Manhattan's inner city. They are largely African-American and
Latino. But their attitudes are not uniquely characteristic of one
particular environment. My daughter lives and teaches 100 miles to the
north in a small village. She reports the same attitudes and problems
of violence--vandalism, rape, arson, drugs, drunken driving. And the 20
percent of students at our school who are white demonstrate a
remarkably similar set of values, fears, and experiences.

School is not the place where children learn about violence, nor is
it the only place where they might unlearn it. Children generally do
not start school until they are 5 or 6 years old. During the next 12
years, they spend only half the days of the year in school--and less
than half of those days are actually spent in class.

Furthermore, while kids may experience violence in school, it is not
a regular part of their school days. In contrast, it is a daily part of
many young people's experiences in their neighborhood, and even in some
of their homes. Metal detectors don't safeguard their communities.

Violence is normal in the world of today's adolescent. Even worse,
it is glamorous and appealing. When our students let their guard down,
they reveal that their ideal of manliness exudes violence. For women,
the ideal is to be at once tough and docile. To be a man is to sneer at
the weak; to be a woman is to take care of your man's needs. These are
ideals they didn't invent--nor did their families or communities.

This attitude is reinforced by everything they see on television and
in the movies, in print and broadcast advertising, in the worlds of
business and politics. Whether Rambo or a corporate raider, it's the
aggressive guy who gets the job done, regardless of laws and societal
constraints.

Most teachers and parents, meanwhile, seem to struggle under
circumstances that offer no status, glamour, or money. Appearing less
admirable to young people, they are less likely to be effective role
models.

Families spend a great deal of time, as do teachers, trying to pass
on their values. But everything in this adolescent-targeted culture
contradicts the school and family's message.

Parents can exert power over their children when they are also able
to act as protectors. But when limited resources, time, and energy
prohibit them from providing more than the poorest shelter and most
meager food and clothing, they are powerless. They dare not say "no"
because they fear children will go elsewhere--to more dangerous and
lucrative places.

These are not the consequences of style and culture; they are rooted
in public policy. Children will know they are valuable--and
valued--when they and their families are treated so.

If parents have no decent housing, job, or health care; if, in fact,
their kids can make more money than they; if they must beg the
government for every bit of help they receive; if parents are demeaned
by our leaders and by the media; then their children will regard them
in the same way. They cannot reclaim parental authority without changes
in public policy.

There must be a renewed, visible national commitment to end the
racism and sexism that still dominate our public and private lives.
Things may be better than they were 30 years ago, but that does not
mean much to my students. They are children now, and their pain is
now.

We must spend money on children's needs apart from their schooling.
Our school facilities should become places for year-round, weeklong
supervised activities where children can build their minds and
friendships--swimming pools, libraries, music classes, clubs of all
sorts. We need to offer these kinds of options to youngsters. But
school buildings currently sit empty while children spend hours in
front of TV sets watching shows that feed their feelings of emptiness
and powerlessness.

Schools are one critical place where society can intervene--but only
one. To be effective, schools too must change. If we had invented
schools purposely to increase the attractions of the streets, to
promote peer isolation, to undermine adult authority, and to make kids
sneer at "culture," they would look like America's junior and senior
high schools today.

When such schools were first designed, few were expected to complete
them. A small elite, hungry for learning or getting ahead, took honors
classes, joined school organizations, served as leaders of their
student governments. But most either dropped out, got pushed out, or
attended classes with little show of interest. It was not until quite
recently that all citizens were expected to meet high intellectual
standards.

We created schools that treated--and still treat--children as a
fungible mass. Even the mass-production factories that served as a
model for schools never tried anything as anonymous and mindless. Our
kids are expected to spend their time going from one disconnected
subject to another every 35 to 45 minutes. Math follows English, home
economics follows literature--and then we wonder why young people fail
to notice connections between subjects, forget one year what they
learned the last, and rarely take any of it seriously.

For teachers, there is hardly any opportunity and certainly no
incentive to compare notes with colleagues, linger with students at the
end of classes, or even think about how they might change their
presentation for the next class. There is no time to get to know the
peculiarities of each student. With a daily teaching load of 150
students, a teacher dares not give homework that requires anything more
than perfunctory marking or review.

Teachers work without the basic facilities that the poorest office
provides: telephones, computers, copying machines, typewriters, support
staff. They have no time or place for professional privacy, away from
their students.

Our schools are like a badly organized conference that goes on and
on for 185 days, with too many plenary sessions, few breaks, no time
for talking with colleagues, poor food, and a few bad-tempered
presenters who yell at the audience or belittle an attendee who falls
asleep at the back of the room.

Nor do we treat parents in these schools much better. We do not
require their employers to let them visit schools during school hours.
We schedule appointments and visits at times that often require them to
lose pay, and we get annoyed at them for making "excuses" for not
coming.

And none of this is necessary. We could make schools smaller, so
that teachers could get to know children, kids could know each other,
and parents and teachers could interact naturally. Just because we
built big buildings for them, schools needn't be organized under one
banner or leader; these facilities can house many different
enterprises.

And all parents could have the right to choose between accessible
educational alternatives. They could have the assistance of
professionals whose task it is to evaluate such options on their
behalf.

And teachers could have the power to use their increased knowledge
of each other, their students, and their students' families to make
critical on-site decisions.

The Central Park East schools follow such a prescription. They are
small; they are nurtured by a district committed to choice and staffed
by adults who have extensive on-site power to make decisions.

We know we cannot prevent tragedy from striking or shield our
students from the harsh world. But because we are small and because the
adults in our schools are not powerless people, we can respond to our
students in ways that tell them they and their ideas are valuable.
That's how kids learn compassion.

In a single week, we have had to deal with the death of a beloved
school secretary, the loss in a fire of members of one student's
family, and the tragic events in Central Park. Only a week later, we
had to address the sudden death of the first black chancellor of New
York City's schools.

We have faced these tragedies seriously and deeply. That's one way
we help young people learn that we love life, respect all people, and
cherish each other.

Deborah Meier is principal of Central Park East Secondary School and
the Jackie Robinson school complex in New York City. This essay is
adapted from her testimony this month to the House Select Committee on
Children, Youth, and Families.

Vol. 08, Issue 36, Page 32

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